The HM Revenue & Customs site gets my award for the most confusing site(s) I’ve seen in a long time.

compare this with this.

Both take you into something to do with VAT and Tax, and may be tied to your Company or to you as an Individual, or both, in some way.

And then you can separately log into the Government Gateway with the same login details …

At CI, we turn it up to 11 ……………………………………………………..

This is great news (the start of convergence at last):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/

“The BBC & ITV intend to test the technical possibilities of streaming more of their TV channels via broadband. We intend to Multicast these. This should result in a higher quality viewer experience. We are running this technical trial to seek some feedback about the quality and availability of these TV channels. Please check the two steps below to take part in the Multicasting trial.”

This has taken >10 years to accomplish (back in the early IWA days I pushed hard for ISPs and broadcasters to get involved, but it was way too early)

Another element of this, that is unique to the UK, is that this will probably be the precursor of the BBC making UK residents have a “TV license” if they have a broadband connection. At the moment you only need to have a license if you have a “TV tuner” (digital or analog).

Finally, they are supporting non-DRM’d video.

Went to Cory’s talk on yet more digital rights management attempts. Can’t help thinking that either (1) this will be far too complicated to create and market successfully or (2) if it works, we consumers deserve everything we get. I hope for (1) of course.

The no2id folks are also doing sterling work – faxyo^D www.writetothem.com now as the vote is this coming Monday.

So, summarising our impending “Digital Identity Top 10″, we have;

1) ID cards that have your ten fingerprints, retinal scans of both eyes and “facial features” – all as part of a system that logs this and every location you ever live, and every time *anyone* checks your identity. From what I understand information is stored on the card and in a “central government database”. So, not so much ID protection as a great potential to be mis-identified (how would you prove your ID if the system ‘got it wrong’, how would you “opt out”) and great potential for fraud (no database is secure, especially ones operated by humans).

Then you must assume that although “optional”, banks, letting agencies, mobile phone companies and the local video store will all insist on your ID card presence to let you do anything (I just rented a flat and they ran an *Experian* check for goodness sake).

2) Mobile phones already disclose your physical location and are used by Social Security to track benefit offences

3) Every single car journey in the UK will be monitored by the government.

4) Your credit and debit card transactions can be monitored to place you and what you purchased

5) Oyster cards disclose every tube/bus journey you make (and although “optional”, if you buy a paper ticket it’s TWICE the price – £3 for a single)

6) Your store cards store your whole shopping profile, they know what you eat (as does anyone who buys the store)

7) RFID tags in retail goods, cars, even pets disclose their presence and communicate or are trackable with other devices

They are ‘digitising’ the whole Criminal Justice system (an ad for the “Information Officer” was just in the Sunday Times) and Health systems

9) DRM will track and restrict how, when and where you can consumer your music, video and TV in ways you cant begin to imagine

10) and the lovely interweb already has your IP address logged and the Google/Flickr/Internet archive keeps a copy of anything you publish (for ever).

(oh and remember the USA takes your fingerprints and retinal scans when you enter the country)

Draw your own conclusions, but is there anything left to monitor short of sticking a webcam to your retina and microphones in your ears?

Got a mention in the Guardian today with my CI hat on…

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1699518,00.html

I said a lot more in my interview of course, like it’s an odd twist of tech history that at one end you’ve got studios pushing up to 192KHz 32-bit sample rates, the production of (doomed) “Super Audio” CDs, surround DVD’s and Hi-Fi “super tweeters”, while digital download music sales are creeping up from very lossy formats to a reasonable level.

It’ll be weird looking back in 10-20 years time when it’ll all be “super-fidelity” digital and fast, I just wonder how many more times we’ll have to buy our music collections in the interim… and I expect CI will still in be the middle of it storing the masters…

And we’ve still got the video hurdles to wade through too of course.

Talk went ok.

Dominique Proust was interesting – mapping the history of Music of the Spheres from Pythagoras to Kepler to Herschel, so I followed on nicely with my 21st Century “Music of the n-dimensional hypercube”

His astronomy research also focussed on the Great Attractor, so he wants to use the Radio Cube sonification tool we have to plug his very rich redshit data into.

Here’s the cathedral with the planetarium dome in the foreground.

.. the upper level of the venue

Inside the planetarium

In an exhibit